Introductions, Gender, and Amplification Every year in #introguitar (an open online guitar class I teach at my school, and which you should totally enrol in as a non-credit participant) I ask my students and our open learners to introduce themselves and their intentions to the group in a brief video. And rather than rehash a […]
Read more "Singing Taylor Swift Songs"Leading up to our first performances in #IntroGuitar, for credit students were asked to prepare brief introductions to their goals in these first efforts. Here is my introduction to the song I selected to perform, an original entitled “Judy and the Town.” While the song is a few years old, I have elected to focus […]
Read more "Learning Project: Performance Goals"Each spring the TALONS undertake an In-Depth Study, a five month “passion project” wherein they are asked to document their growth and learning toward personalized goals in learning a skill or craft. There are two universal goals for the In-Depth Study: 1. Know something about everything and everything about something. In school you are usually […]
Read more "An Open Learning Project"My sister brought back a picture of some graffiti in Saskatoon a few summers ago that I ran with, writing one of my first songs that has continued to grow with me in the years since, and which continues to accompany me in new musical places. I’ve played this song in my kitchen by myself, […]
Read more "Graffiti: An old song with new friends at the GSGW Fall Jam"Simpleton, British Columbia lyrics and chords. We aren’t on strike because we’re losing or we’ve lost. We’re on strike because we still might win.
Read more "Picket Anthems: The Ballad of Simpleton, British Columbia"I’m forever indebted to Alan Levine’s description of #IntroGuitar sometime last spring, where he included Gleneagle‘s Introduction to Guitar 11 in a list of experiments in Open Courses You Won’t Find in the New York Times, A Cheesy Edudemic Infographic, or Among Davos Champagne Sippers: In a basic hosted WordPress web site, he has […]
Read more "“…not a class that teaches guitar, but one where you can learn guitar.”"Something that I haven’t given as much blog attention here as I would have liked so far this semester is the vibrant community that has sprung up around our school’s Introduction to Guitar class. Having had students post their work regularly to a wiki site in past years, I wanted to incorporate some of the […]
Read more "“…totally uncharted territory.”"Jowi & a gossip of Talons We were lucky tonight at Gleneagle to be paid a visit by Jowi Taylor and his wonderful project, the Voyageur Six String Nation Guitar. After meeting Jowi this summer at the Unplug’d conference, it was a great pleasure to have him tell this Canadian story as a fundraising event […]
Read more "Gleneagle joins the Six String Nation"An audio gem from Saturday’s campus fire at Sea to Sky this past weekend, Owl leads the TALONS in a audience-participation version of Solar Power Blues, which he explains in the clip.
Read more "Solar Power Blues"A few weeks ago I had the good fortune to meet a handful of local talented musicians in an afternoon session I delivered at the inaugural Port Moody Youth Arts Festival, where through the course of an afternoon we would set out to write a song. In addition to the afternoon workshop, my name was slated for […]
Read more "Port Moody Youth Arts Festival Songwriting Workshop"